Studies shed light on the people behind the tea party

Michael Mancuso/The TimesTea party demonstrators are shown at the New Jersey Statehouse in Trenton in this file photo.

Just who are the people of the tea party, the big “new thing” in American politics — or at least in the Republican Party?

Lots of claims are made for them. They’re newcomers to electoral politics, some say. Conservatives to be sure, but independents, too, spread pretty evenly throughout the country, largely devoid of racial animus, and broadly representative of a large portion of the whole population.

That’s the stereotype. But a vastly different description emerges in a pair of studies, one by two academic political scientists and a second by a CBS/New York Times poll, both based on extensive interviews with tea partiers.

“Early on, tea partiers were often described as nonpartisan political neophytes,” write political scientists David E. Campbell and Robert D. Putnam. “Actually, tea party supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the tea party was born. In fact, past Republican affiliation is the single strongest predictor of tea party support today.”

The tea party cohort is overwhelmingly white, male and older — on that, the stereotype is on the mark — but it “had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president,” Campbell and Putnam report.

Or, as the CBS/Times poll found when tea partiers were asked what specifically they didn’t like about Obama, “the top answer was that they just don’t like him.”

From the standpoint of future politics and the 2012 presidential race, the most significant finding from the studies may involve the geographical distribution of the tea party loyalists.
If the CBS/Times study has it right, the tea party participation is principally a Southern phenomenon. More than a third “hail from the South, far more than any other region,” it found, and that has important implications for the GOP next year and perhaps beyond.

It’s no secret the modern Republican Party has moved dramatically to the right. Less clear, however, is how much the GOP already is a Dixie-dominated party.

A Kentuckian, Mitch McConnell, is the party’s Senate leader, but must occasionally defer to the ultra-conservative Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who commands its Senate tea party contingent. In the House, Ohioan John Boehner may be the Speaker, but the power behind his shaky throne is Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, a tea party favorite who regularly overruled Boehner during deficit negotiations with President Obama.

It may be a sign of what’s ahead for the GOP that the ultra-right Texas Gov. Rick Perry, another Southerner preferred by tea partiers, has just displaced Mitt Romney as the favored candidate of Republicans. Perry went overnight from virtually unknown to a double-digit poll lead over the mostly moderate Romney.

The Texas governor benefits from another preoccupation of the tea party crowd — its preference, like his, for a politics rooted in religion. Tea party leaders may parade under the banner of smaller government, but the rank and file, Campbell and Putnam stress, “are more concerned about putting God in government,” something most Americans say they oppose.

While it’s clear the tea party has a chokehold on the GOP at the moment, that’s no guarantee it will hold true through the 2012 election.

There is, for example, a stark contradiction in the whole tea party experience. Even as the country increasingly seems to favor smaller government — a tea party priority — it also has soured on the movement itself.

Over the past year, opposition to the tea party and its no-compromise contribution to the political paralysis in Washington has more than doubled, according to the Campbell-Putnam study, exceeding even the disapproval level of those other bottom-feeders, the Democratic and Republican parties.

Whatever its long-term liabilities, the tea party has been an electoral God-send for the GOP, the muscle behind its 2010 victories. But Campbell and Putnam see an ominous similarity to the 1960s anti-Vietnam War movement and the damage it did to Democratic election fortunes.

Like the anti-war movement, the tea party has brought energy and passion to politics — but also a stridency and tendency to extremism that’s eventually a turn-off for voters, especially the independents and moderates vital to victory.